Focus on the patient not on profit?

Back in our May issue, we focused on one of the hottest topics in pharma today – patient-centricity. Much has been said over the years about this important issue but in 2015 it really came into its own.

“Look around,” said
David Loew of Sanofi. “Aren’t we all patients? It’s no longer us and them.”
Yet, how can pharma deliver on this long-awaited promise? Revolution not
evolution is needed, said industry thought-leader David Laws. “Being a
patient-centric organisation is not continuing what we do today and doing more
patient stuff; it’s actually replacing some of the things we do today with new
stuff, and we haven’t got our heads around that.”

LEO Pharma's chief executive, Gitte Aabo, went further: “We
are not here to generate profits. We generate profits in order to provide
better solutions to patient; we are not providing better solutions just to make
money.” To help drive this approach, 40 percent of LEO employee incentives are
now aligned to areas that are purely in the patient’s interests.

Financial results will follow, said Roch Doliveux, former
UCB chief executive. “You gain credibility the day you decide to walk away from
money when it would not be the best thing for patients. Then you perform better
in making a real difference to the lives of patients, then you deliver superior
drugs and then you deliver superior results to shareholders,” he said.

Back to basics

Customer experience, or CX for those with a tendency toward
acronyms, is today’s darling of consumer marketing and, increasingly, our
clients are asking us why it is important, how they can do it and what it will
return.

For too long we have treated doctors and patients
differently from typical ‘consumer customers’.
With more competition for cut-through than ever before, we need to
ensure that all interactions are as impactful and personalised as possible,
that content is high quality, relevant and meaningful. To do this, we need to
listen to the individual customer to understand what is important to him or
her.

We also need to move toward consumer marketing principles –
why would we target those living with type 2 diabetes differently from how
Costa Coffee or British Airways might interact with them? The benefit? More
engaged, higher value customers.

Let’s get back to the basics of great marketing and
communications – delivering engaging and inspirational campaigns that maximise
the experience for all.

Nicky Walsby,
executive director, Health Unlimited

Listen and converse

During 2015, there has been a trend towards some of our
pharma clients adopting a more consumer-centric approach to communications – a
greater appetite for engaging customers through above-brand activities to
create relationships that go beyond the transactional.

Health professionals’ expectations are changing and we are
competing with a host of channels for share of voice. Smaller, more nimble
companies are leading the charge, taking learnings from FMCG in how to listen,
show empathy and converse with their customers.

As an industry, we have to develop more sophisticated ways
to engage within the regulatory environment and find better methods of
measuring the value of these approaches. With a new competitor set of SMEs on
the horizon, it really feels like now is our time to act.

Kirsty Mearns,
managing director, Just:: Health Communications

Breaking the habit

Patient/customer-centricity has been a hot topic throughout
2015, and rightly so. We’ve seen companies embrace the idea of putting the
patient at the centre of the design process, which leads to better outcomes for
patients, customers and brand.

However, patient- and customer-centricity is mainly
understood in the context of designing new services, yet the process of
redesigning existing services can easily leave current users behind.

Getting people to take action is hard, while getting people
to change an action that has become a habit is even harder. It is necessary to
conduct in-depth customer research to understand their needs and behaviours in
order to bring about the desired outcomes and a smooth transition to the new
journey for all users.

In the next 12 months, we expect to see a shift toward a
deeper understanding of how to redesign patient services. In addition to
digital innovation, there will be more consideration for how to transition
existing customers or patients to new solutions by taking a behavioural change
approach. A focus on behaviour change is the natural evolution of patient and
customer centric design.